Help with St Croix furnace auger mystery

[lsirois]

I have a "new to me" St Croix SCF-050 furnace. It ran in my garage for a day to make sure that it worked fine...had no issues. Moved it to the basement, got it all hooked up and started it. It ran fine for a solid 12h at various settings. It was running on the lowest setting (setting 1) and at some point, the auger jammed and everything stopped. I ended up having to pull the auger motor (and it was quite a struggle) and was amazed at what I found. Have any of you seen this before and have an explanation for it? It looks liked a bunch of fuzed/burnt pellets that were at the tip of the auger. Would it really get that hot at the end of the auger to create this if the auger was stopped/jammed?

 

[lsirois]

I gave the pellet chute a good scrubbing....it needed it, but I couldn't really see anything that could have caused the formation of this "thing". I guess my concern is that the pellets in the auger caught on fire, but I just cannot imagine how that could happen unless the auger was stopped for some other reason and the pellets just smoldered.